OCR Pipelines: Tesseract, PaddleOCR, and When to Use Which

Mon, 05 Jan 2026 11:00:00 +0000

I have a filing cabinet’s worth of scanned documents — receipts, manuals, the occasional important letter from an institution that still believes in paper — and a stubborn refusal to feed them through a cloud OCR service that charges per page and keeps a copy. So I run optical character recognition locally. The good news is that self-hosted OCR has quietly become excellent. The bad news is there are two serious contenders, they’re good at different things, and the internet is full of people insisting their favourite is universally best. It isn’t. Let me save you the afternoon I lost finding out.

Tesseract - Tag - vo.rs

OCR Pipelines: Tesseract, PaddleOCR, and When to Use Which